Secondary Navigation

Primary Navigation

Brocade Extends Gen 6 Fibre Channel Portfolio

Today’s organizations are under pressure to digitize everything to be more competitive, maximize revenue growth, and increase productivity. Yet explosive data growth, coupled with user expectations of unlimited access from anywhere, at any time, on any device, is pushing storage environments to the limit.

To meet these dynamic business demands, the network must evolve to improve speed, efficiency and costs. This requires looking beyond legacy infrastructure, which was not designed to support the performance requirements of evolving workloads and flash-based storage technology—and will therefore impede the performance of an all-flash data center. Organizations need a new approach to storage networking and to unlock the full capabilities of flash. By treating the network as a strategic part of a storage environment, organizations can maximize their productivity and efficiency as they rapidly grow their environments.

The Brocade G610, which was recently unveiled in Kuala Lumpur, provides an affordable storage switch without compromising on performance and reliability. Leveraging the power of Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology, it delivers a flash-ready solution for the always-on, digital business. With its combination of up to 32 Gbps performance, simplicity and enterprise-class functionality, the Brocade G610 aims to provide exceptional price/performance value in an entry-level switch.

Brocade G610 – an affordable, no-compromise storage switch for the modern data center

The Brocade G610 offers small to midsized data centers affordable access to industry-leading Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology. Organizations gain the best of both worlds: high-performance access to industry-leading storage technology, and the ability to start small and grow on demand, from 8 to 24 ports, to support an evolving storage environment.

The Brocade G610 is purportedly easy to use and install, with a point-and-click user interface that simplifies deployment and saves time. Brocade also announced expanded monitoring capabilities through Brocade Fabric Vision technology with the availability of VM Insight. VM Insight delivers proactive visibility into the health and performance of individual virtual machines (VMs) to help administrators uncover issues before applications are affected.

Digital transformation, the rapid adoption of flash storage and the emergence of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) are driving new requirements for a modern infrastructure that can optimize application performance and adapt to evolving data center needs. To meet those needs, Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN solutions are designed to provide digital enterprises with non-stop availability and built-in NVMe capabilities for all-flash data centers.

“The Brocade G610 switch and VM Insight reinforce Brocade’s continued commitment to Fibre Channel innovation to help customers derive more value from their applications and infrastructure,” said Aziz Ali, Malaysia country manager for Brocade. “Together with our partner ecosystem, Brocade is making it easy and affordable to deploy Fibre Channel solutions while extending monitoring capabilities in Fabric Vision technology so customers can have unparalleled visibility of VM-level application performance within the storage network.”

Partner advocate

“The use of all-flash arrays for consolidation of mission-critical primary storage workloads is increasing rapidly, and by 2020, IDC predicts that these types of systems will drive over 80 percent of all primary storage revenues,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage, IDC. “Flash’s ability to support much denser workload consolidation is demanding higher-performance host connections, and Brocade’s new Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio provides that bandwidth with a trusted and highly secure protocol.”

“Whole-brain imaging is critical to our research but advances in imaging and microscopy place new demands on our network and storage infrastructure every day,” said Jake Carroll, senior information technology manager of research, The University of Queensland’s Queensland Brain Institute. “Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions massively boost data transfer speeds enabling scientists to maximize the benefits of increased image resolution and high data sampling rates.”

The entire Brocade Gen 6 product family with Fabric Vision technology now includes VM Insight to help organizations achieve greater visibility into VM-level application performance. Using integrated sensors, this new capability allows administrators to monitor VM statistics and quickly identify abnormal VM behaviours. This facilitates troubleshooting and fault isolation while providing intelligence for early detection of application performance degradations to help support critical service level agreements. VM Insight extends and complements the automated monitoring, diagnostic and management capabilities enabled by Fabric Vision technology.

“The ability to protect, analyze and transport data reliably and affordably is an enormous competitive advantage,” said Marty Lans, senior director and general manager of Storage Connectivity, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “The combination of HPE 3PAR and Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions has the potential to transform businesses of all shapes and sizes, enabling them to derive maximum benefit from investments in technologies like flash, NVMe, cloud and virtualization. The introduction of the new SN3600B Fibre Channel switch bolsters our current Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio with a new offering to put Fibre Channel SAN within reach of even more customers.”

Availability

The Brocade G610 switch with Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology is available now through Brocade and its channel partners. Hewlett Packard Enterprise just started shipping the Brocade G610 switch. Other Brocade OEM partners plan to start shipping the new switch in the second quarter of 2017.